EVA 8000 - SCSI level - what does this mean ?

[grahame lancaster]

Hi,

EVA 8000 - connected to HP BL465Cs running ESX 3.5.

We have major freezing issues on 2 of our file servers which have 1 TB LUNs.

As part of the troubleshooting I have been going through a 'Veeam' document (software that documents the VMware environment) which mentions 'SCSI Level 6'. we only have RAID 5 and 1 set on the EVA. I long shot I know but does anyone know what this means or refers to.

Heres an example of the LUN information the report produces



Name vmhba0:2:23
Capacity 500 Gb
Block Size 512
Device Name /vmfs/devices/disks/vml.0200170000600508b40010883c0000e000090a0000485356323130
Device Type disk
Model HSV210
Revision 6200
SCSI Level 6
SCSI Level Specified True
Serial Number unavailable
Vendor HP
Host xxxxx

[Uwe Zessin]

I think this field shows the ANSI SCSI standard revision level. Certainly not the (V)RAID level.

[Kites BM]

i think its unrelated to RAID,

SCSI Level 6 refers to arbitration level that SCSI will use to transfer data.

[grahame lancaster]

cheers for replies.

I guess if it's not related to RAID its not something I need to worry about? (and is an inherant feature of EVA 80000)

[Uwe Zessin]

It is a feature of the SCSI protocol.

[grahame lancaster]

ok - ta, so it's a standard scsi protocol and can therefore be ignored as a factor in this troubleshooting?. Sorry if I'm being slow on the uptake, on a steep leearning curve at the moment.

Cheers.

[Uwe Zessin]

Yes, you cannot change this field explicitly.

It might change (pure guess - I've never looked into it) as a side-effect if a host's operating system type is altered, but I assume you have set your host to "VMware" in Command View EVA.

Are you using VCB?

[grahame lancaster]

Thanks UWE

Yes - we have set the hosts to "VMware" in Command View EVA.

We do use VCB, but only after businees hours, not when we have the freezes

cheers, G

[Uwe Zessin · Accepted solution]

I would start with looking at the file

/var/log/vmkernel

it contains timestamps so you can easily check if something happend during a freeze.

(If you want somebody here on ITRC have a look at it, please create a simple .TXT file, put it in a .ZIP archive and then attach it to a response - thanks)

[grahame lancaster]

will do cheers for the pointers...